A Perfect Blood

when he’d caught us. He’d expected I’d try to escape, and I’d walked right into it.
    My head hurt, the sulfites used to preserve the cheap food I’d been eating for the last twenty-four hours finally having built up to where they were hitting me hard. Frustrated, I yanked on a huge chunk of wallboard, cringing when it broke away with a pattering of dust. I stopped, deciding the hole was big enough to squeeze through—I couldn’t stand being in this bathroom another second. Fingers curved under and hurting, I crawled through the hole in the wall. My back protested as the edges pinched me, and my muscles felt stiff.
    My foot caught on a chunk of wallboard, scraping on the floor when it tore free. Still on my hands and knees, I froze, hair in my face as I held my breath and gazed at the faint light coming from behind the file cabinets and what looked like an ancient furnace. Not a sound broke the stillness, and slowly my pulse returned to normal.
    Moving carefully, I stood and flexed my cold hands, my band of silver thumping down into my wrist. Satisfaction, and a little pride, made me smile. I’d gotten out without using any magic. None. Regardless, it made me all the more determined that I was going to get this stupid-ass bracelet off. Oh God. Al. I had to come up with something really big to bribe him with. Maybe if I made enough tulpas to buy his library back. But I knew it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. I’d torn a hole in the ever-after, and it was collapsing slowly but surely.
    “I’ll be right back,” I whispered to Winona, knowing she couldn’t hear me, then set a dusty box to hide the hole I’d made in the wall.
    The stairs were a sure way out, but I wasn’t leaving without Winona, and she was too noisy on them. Not to mention that the front door upstairs would be locked, with an alarm attached. Attracting official attention would be great, but it would take fifteen minutes for anyone to get out here, plenty of time to be recaptured and relocated. HAPA was scum, but their people were well trained and efficient.
    What I really wanted was a quiet, unalarmed basement window to sneak out of. Hesitating, I turned away from the slight glow and picked my way deeper into the basement. There probably wasn’t an elevator or a second set of stairs, since Gerald hadn’t set up any cameras in this direction, but maybe there was a window.
    Ducking under an iron water pipe, I felt my way, looking for the faintest glimmer of starlight. Thick walls of old fieldstone held up the ceiling, supplemented by modern pipe supports. File boxes, dingy office furniture, and old displays, getting older the farther I went, that had once been upstairs filled the space.
    “That looks promising,” I whispered when the concrete floor became dry, dusty tile, and I found what looked like an old shower stall. Squinting, I looked over the tattered shower curtain and a broken commode that looked as if it hadn’t seen water since the Turn. Across from them were two tall lockers, dented and with the latches broken. Janitors’ shower? My heart pounded when I saw the black-painted square surrounded by the rough stone walls of the original foundation. It had to be a window—right at my head level.
    Excited, I went back into the mess behind me to find something to stand on. The rolling chair on casters was out, but the heavy wooden crate with PLANETS stenciled on it was ideal. Ivy . I missed her—she must be worried sick. Jenks, too. Wayde probably wasn’t having a very good day, either, though my capture was not his fault. The heavy box scraped lightly on the tile as I dragged it backward, and I winced. The dust tickled my nose, and I made one of those prissy-girl sneezes, almost blowing out my ears.
    I finally got the box in place and scrambled up. “Please move,” I begged the gods of irony, and my breath slipped out when the thin panel of glass shifted upward, the strips of metal grinding on the tracks.
    Cold air bathed my face. The night was calm, the hum of the interstate traffic faint and distant. There was a raggedy foundation bush in front of me, but I could see the empty parking lot to my left, and an open field and woods to my right. It would be a tight squeeze, but I was fairly sure both Winona and I could make it. Once outside, we could be halfway to somewhere before they knew we were gone.
    I took one last breath of freedom, then pulled the window shut lest the fresher air give me away. As I stepped